Autumn also known as The Autumn almanac of Tokyo is a project undertaken during a three month residency at the Australian Council studio in Tokyo. It takes an experimental form: an interactive calendar, a chronicle of audiovisual prose poems, an online multimedia journal of sorts, that uses materials at hand (e.g. ephemerals, facsimiles of objects, images, video footage collected from the local environment) to create moving/ interactive ‘collages’ that respond to, perhaps encapsulate, and speculate about the experience of Tokyo – each day during the three-month period of the residency – the time of Autumn.

The structure of the project is based on the Chinese lunar-solar calendar. Besides the 12 lunar months (moons), the year is also divided into 24 solar terms (Jie qi) as determined by the path and position of the sun. Each term lasts around 15 days and are designed to help farmers plan their activities. These terms describe the seasons, the weather, and changes. They are as follows:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_term] Wikipedia has in-depth entries concerning this calendar.

The 15 days of each solar term are further divided into 3 pentads (hou): first pentad, second pentad, and last pentad, totalling 72 in one year. Each pentad is summarised by a phrase that describes conditions of crops, animal behaviours, or the weather. Japanese culture has adopted this calendar and made its own modifications to suit its native surroundings.

Each entry in this almanac is a response to each day of each pentad under each of the solar term during my stay in Tokyo. This response could be related to an event of the day, the weather, or the environment. Only media collected on the day will be used for the post on the same day.

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How to use the almanac

– click on ‘Autumn (Tokyo Studio)’ under ‘Look at’ to go to the 10 latest posts;
– scroll down and click on ‘older entries’ to go to the previous 10 entries;
– scroll down and click on ‘newer entries’ to go to the next 10 entries;
– Click on the titles of the posts or the thumbnail images to go to the posts;
– click ‘next’ or ‘previous’ to navigate to the entries that follow or precede to the current entry;
– use the ‘Calendar’ and ‘Search’ function to find particular entries using dates or keywords.

Go to the first entries.

Jo Law

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.